Hot Rods & Custom Stuff: Doing It All In Southern California Hot Rods & Custom Stuff has been in business since 1989. When it began it consisted of one rented bay and a tiny attached office. Today the company consists of five buildings and has 35 full-time employs who have all the work they can handle. Located in Escondido (in North San Diego County), HR&CS and provides one-stop shopping for those who love and drive hot rods and classic cars of all types. Not only do they perform complete frame-off restorations and customizations, they will service your daily driver even if all you need is an oil-change. |
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The brains and brawn behind Hot Rods & Custom Stuff are mom-and-pop owners Randy and “Peaches” Clark. Randy is the grandson of and old-school fabricator/blacksmith/welder who made his living making metal conform to his wishes. At age 12 Randy purchased his first classic car, a Model T, for which he paid the grand sum of $12. It didn’t run, but that didn’t matter to him. Later, he traded it for a 1930 Model A five-window coupe that did run. That car carried him through high school and his first job working at a gas station (of course!). To make a long story short Randy has been buying, selling, trading and working on cars all of his life, “I’ve owned thousands”, he says. You might say that owning and operating one of the premier hot rod shops in the country came naturally to him. | ||
The first stop for most projects is the blast booth. HR&CS operates one of the few plastic-media blast booths in the industry. Installed in 1990 as an alternative to acid dipping and sand blasting for stripping paint, it has been a real asset to the company. Besides being environmentally friendly, it is the best way to strip paint without damaging the metal or leaving behind residue than can later ruin an expensive paint job. Once a part is stripped it sent to the fabrication or body shop depending on what needs doing. | ||
The backbone of HR&CS is the fabrication shop. Here is where metal is cut, bent, hammered, straightened, welded and reborn. Frame-off restorations and customization projects start here. With a full compliment of welders, cutters, English wheels, power hammers and talent there is very little that cannot be done with a piece of metal. From the scratch fabrication of steel tube frame, to repairing 50-year-old sheet metal that looks like it has been used for target practice, it can be done here. Chopping, channeling and customizing are all in a day’s work for the HR&CS fabricators. While the fabricators are busy chopping and channeling, the mechanical shop is busy wrenching. Here’s where the motors come to get rebuilt, tuned, or hopped up. Here, too, is where you can get your baby tuned by someone who still knows what the words “gap” and “dwell” mean (ever tried to get your ’57 tuned by someone who only knows what to do if a computer tells him how?). At HR&CS the guy who wants classic car tuned by an old-school mechanic is just as important as the guy who wants a show quality ride built. The mechanical shop is also where after-market upgrades like disc brakes, AC and power windows are installed in finished cars. |
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After the fabricators have finished, the next stop is the body shop. The body shop performs both metal (collision) repair, and body finishing prior to paint. The key to a superior paint job is the body prep. Here the body and other parts are primed, filled, and sanded (repeatedly), until the surfaces are so smooth that a piece of window glass feels rough by comparison. A variety of fillers are used to fill and seal the myriad imperfections (most not visible to the naked eye) that grace any piece of bare metal. When the sweating stops, the result is a super smooth finish that seals all the pores in the metal and is ready to accept a show-stopping paint job. | ||
Once the body men have worked their magic, it’s just a short trip to the paint and assembly shop. The shop is equipped with two booths. The newest is a state-of-the-art downdraft with a computerized filter and heat system designed to particle-free paint jobs cured at the proper temperature—important when using today’s high-tech (and expensive) paints. Once the paint is on, it is time to assemble the cars, and a special crew of assemblers whose sole job is to bring all the pieces together and make them work accomplishes that. Here is where the bodies go back on their frames, engines slip into their mounts, and rear ends are hung with care. Here, too, is where HR&CS’s new upholstery shop skins the interiors. By doing upholstery in-house, they are able to better control the process and work closer with the customer to get things just right—things that were not always possible when work had to be sent out. | ||
As you might have guessed, a shop this big turns out some pretty big projects. One of the best known is the M-80, a ’49 Chevy Business Coupe that made its debut and the 49th annual Detroit Autorama in 2001. By the end of the show it had not only won the Riddler Award, but the Yosemite Sam Radoff Sculptural Excellence award, among many others. Many cars have rolled out of the Hot Rods & Custom Stuff garage and straight into the pages and covers of the nations best know car magazines, and on to win hundreds of awards at shows nationwide. | ||
Randy & the M-80 at the 2001 Detroit Autorama showing off just a few of the awards that were taken home. |
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The M-80, a ‘49 Chevy Business built for Chris Williams. | ||
The Street Rodder Magazine Road Tour Car in the fabrication shop. The body is a Brookville, the frame is one of Hot Rods & Custom Stuff’s “Deuce Steel” custom frames. | ||
The Road Tour Car getting a “makeover” in the body shop. |
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The Road Tour Car going together in the assembly area. | The Road Tour car ready to hit the road and tour the country. | |
A ‘Cuda gets new paint in HR&CS’s state-of-the-art downdraft paint booth.
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Randy Clark being interviewed by Lance Lambert of “The Vintage Vehicle Show”, outside his shop in Escondido California. | ||
A recently completed ’40 Ford Woodie built for Ted & Nancy Harcksen. |
A line-up of HR&CS cars on a side street in Escondido during the city’s Friday Evening “Cruisin’ Grand Ave.” On the left is the Henne’s ’55 F-100 which appeared on the cover of Truck Builder. Next to it is a ’47 Ford panel that was turned into an exact replica of the fire/rescue truck driven by Jim Page in his early years. The powder blue Desoto belongs to “Peaches” Clark. The ruby red ’32 was built for Jerry Johnson and appeared in Rod & Custom Magazine. |
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Chick Koszis’ old-style, no frills roadster. The motor is a Chevy 355 small-block with a Mooneyham blower and dual quad 600 cfm carbs. |
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A totally custom ’68 Camaro built for Graham Weiss which appeared in the July 2004 issue of Super Chevy magazine. | ||
Gale Griffith's 51 Chevy De Luxe appeared in the October ’04 issue of Custom Rodder. This is one sweet ride! | This 37 Ford Deluxe 2dr Sedan belongs to the Minshews. It sports a 385hp Street & Performance 351 Ford Windsor, and a TCI AOD transmission with no-lock-up converter. | |
If all that were not enough, HR&CS also has a partsstore that can get you just about anything you might need or want. While they do not keep a large parts inventory in stock, they are authorized dealers for over 80 after-market suppliers and will help you find and order whatever they need. Hot Rods also makes several proprietary products that are sold under the Deuce Steel brand name. One of these products is their ’32 Ford frame, which is specially designed to give the car a lower stance and provides extra room in the engine and passenger compartments. | ||
Andrew Gonzales brought Hot Rods & Custom Stuff a fairly nice ’29 Model A and asked them to make it better. They did. | ||
Many of these projects are profiled on their website www.hotrodscustomstuff.com Once there, you can browse over 800 pages of project photos and technical information. Created in-house, their website logged over 43 millionhits last year and averages 2-3,000 unique visitors each day. In addition to seeing beauty shots of finished vehicles produced at the shop, the Hot Rods website gives visitors a peek behind the scenes. If you ever wanted to know what it takes to build a hot rod and how they work their magic, the website shows it all and is definitely worth a visit. It is also great information resource with an extensive links directory targeted to the old car enthusiast. If you are ever in the San Diego area, be sure to make a trip to Escondido (about a half hour north of downtown San Diego) and visit their shop. They will be happy to show you around and give you a peek at what is going on. And if you take your hot rod with you, you might even end up on their website... |